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Two women, two views about mixed race identity. Together they created Mixie and the Halfbreeds

In a traditional setting, there’s the world of the performance and characters onstage, and then there’s the reality of the performers and audience. One does not erase or diminish the other; in fact, both are necessary for the play to even occur.

Zoe Doyle and Vanessa Trenton in Mixie and the Halfbreeds. (JORDAN PROBST)

To playwright Adrienne Wong that’s not far from her experiences living as a mixed race person. Wong’s French and Chinese, two sides of her heritage existing simultaneously to make the complete person. So it’s fitting that Mixie and the Halfbreeds,her collaboration with actor and playwright Julie Tamiko Manning, is coming to Toronto with an all-female cast and crew, including director Jenna Rodgers, who is also of mixed race.

The play, which began life as a CBC Radio drama that never came to fruition, begins performances April 3 in a fu-GEN Theatre presentation.

“It’s this weird thing where we’re parsing fractions of ourselves to understand how, in what way we belong,” Wong said. “I’m half this and a quarter this and quarter that.

“It makes me feel a little segmented, but my experience as myself is not about segmentation. People talk about being half of or half-breeds facetiously, but I prefer the term ‘mixie’ because it’s more of my experience,” she said.

Manning, on the other hand, has found strength embracing her halfness and the term “Hapa,” which originated in Hawaii but has now come to mean “half pan-Asian.”

“I really loved discovering that word because I finally found a label that I actually am proud to wear,” Manning said. “‘Hapa’ really spoke to me because I’ve been trying to figure out what it is to be half. Growing up, I was trying so hard to prove the Japanese side of myself, I kind of let go of the idea of being mixed.”

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Mixie and the Halfbreeds was born out of a joke between a group of mixed race artists collaborating on a production in Vancouver in the mid-2000s, including Manning, in which they imagined a punk rock group of that name.

The play contains many multitudes about that lived experience, including Wong’s and Manning’s conflicting views about the very concept of being divided into fractions according to ancestry.

When the play premiered in Vancouver in 2009, Manning played the titular Mixie and Wong played Mixie’s mixed race neighbour Trixie, channelling their personal stories directly into their fictional creations.

In the production opening in Toronto, Manning and Wong have rewritten significant parts of the original play, incorporating the experiences of two new performers, Zoe Doyle as Mixie and Vanessa Trenton as Trixie, so they too can play with the multitudes of themselves as well as the characters they play.

“We move back and forth between two different worlds,” Wong said. “The fictive world of Mixie and Trixie and their adventures, and then also another world of Nessa and Zoe, who are the actors and are our hosts. They act as MCs for the night and they have this big trick they want to show.”

To Wong, the different worlds in Mixie and the Halfbreeds are yet another way to convey the unique experience of living as a mixed race person. It might look like two different plays, but they’re just one. And the differences in attitude between Manning and Wong come out in the relationship between Mixie and Trixie.

“There are these two completely different women, personality-wise, that recognize the mixie-ness of each other. The two women are isolated at the beginning of the play and then are sort of thrown onto this journey together and come out of it having found each other at the end,” said Manning. “It’s an incredibly simple story that, for me, is about friendship. And that has not changed from the beginning.”

And that element of Mixie and the Halfbreeds springs directly from Manning’s experience, coming from her base in Montreal and finding the group of artists in Vancouver who sparked the punk band joke.

“I was coming from a place of real loneliness, actually. Talking to people who had a deep understanding of what that meant was a huge thing for me. It was very emotional, but it was also very celebratory because you’re, like, ‘It’s not just me.’”

To Wong and Manning, identities and communities both contain multitudes: disagreements, joys, fractures and harmonies. And they’re worth celebrating in all their complexities.

Mixie and the Halfbreeds is at the Scotiabank Studio Theatre, Pia Bouman School, 6 Noble St., April 3 to 15. See fu-gen.org for tickets and information.

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